On Wednesday, September 17, 2003, at 03:06 PM, Brian Gibbons wrote:
From: "Juha Saarinen"
Verisign owns .com and .net?
Don't forget that up until now Microsoft owned the World Wide Web.
Type this into IE www.dfghjkl.co.nz, rather than getting a DNS error you end up at Xtra MSN, thus Microsoft have built logic into IE to redirect non existant domain errors to a Microsoft MSN affiliate.
So you could say that Verisign is just playing the same game that Microsoft has been playing.
But with Microsoft youhad a choice - you could change browsers - and other people could compete with MS by releasing their own browsers that default to their own web properties/ With Verisign, unless you purposefully break DNS implementation yourself, you have no choice, and no one can compete with them. According to Alexa stats, Verisign has already rushed past MSN in web site visibilty. Look at their new reach ranking: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=verisign.com All done in a matter of 24 hours at practically zero cost. I never thought I'd say this, but I'd LOVE for Microsoft to sue them for anti-competitive actions.